Overview

Derek Mong’s highly anticipated new poetry collection, The Identity Thief, is a gathering of voices borrowed and voices lost. These illuminating poems explore how one learns—in an effort to cope, escape, survive, or atone—about the possibilities of becoming someone else. In this collection of poems full of movement and wonder, saints, thieves, environmentalists, new parents, and glaciers all speak. The Identity Thief imagines the pleasures of being an other, using the contemporary dramatic monologue to dazzling effect. The result is a poetry collection full of vision and insight.

Author Biography

Derek Mong is the author of two poetry collections from Saturnalia Books, Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (forthcoming, 2018), and a chapbook of Latin adaptions, The Ego and the Empiricist (Two Sylvias Press, fall 2017). The Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College, he holds degrees from Stanford (Ph.D), the University of Michigan (M.F.A.), and Denison University (B.A.). His poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, Court Green, the New England Review and elsewhere. With his wife and co-translator, Anne O. Fisher, he has completed The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin. He blogs at the Kenyon Review Online and reviews poetry for the Gettysburg Review.